Studio Planning!

Tags

floorplan, layout, planning, studio

I’m such a geek! I love graph paper and planning out my space. In this new house the room that is my studio has a strange layout. Here is my sketch.

The room would be 25′ x 13′ if it weren’t for the staircase and the chimney in the middle. Also, it is the former attic so the ceiling is just over 4′ tall where it meets the outside walls. It is over 7′ tall in the center (where the obstacles are). So I have to put short furniture along the outside walls. This is one of the few times I’m happy to be short.

I have a 2 drawer filing cabinet that is wide rather than tall and I’m leaving it where it is. My printer is sitting on it – it will get set up when we find the cord. In addition to that I have 2 dressers, 2 book shelves, and 2 very different desks to arrange in this space. Here are the little pieces of furniture that I made to scale to play around with on my sketch.

This weekend we are going to get the furniture in place and then I get to start putting things where they belong! I’m so excited! I think I’m going to put the pieces in my gratitude journal when I’m all done. What are you grateful for today?

Illuminated Storage & Running Round in Circles

Tags

100 Mandalas, art, collage, Diva Challenge, DIY, mehndi, small space, storage, zentangle

This is getting close to the design I want for my shower curtain! I’m going to make some collage, mandala design and color palate changes, but I’m getting close! We got 2 more relocation cubes of stuff and our little house is bursting at the seams. The good news is that we have all of the parts of our bed together, I found my kitchen knives and pot covers and I found my PAINTBRUSHES!

Here is how the storage box is looking so far. Do you think I should copy the top 2″ of the labyrinth side onto the cover? I’m going to store bed linens/hats etc. in it and have it in a stack of similar boxes in the corner of the living room. I’ll post photos when I’m done. I’ve been watching Small Space Big Style on HGTV when I need to take a rest to keep me motivated and inspired.

Oh, I looked at what the Diva challenge was for this week and it was to use circles and the  title was “Running Round in Circles” which really seemed fitting for my art and my life right now!

Chartres Labyrinth on Watercolor Grid & Cat

Tags

100 Mandalas, art, cat, collage, gouache, grid, labyrinth, watercolor

The storage box I’m decorating is coming along nicely. I’m working out ideas for designs for our shower curtain. I was thinking a labyrinth with some color but I don’t think so. This is my interpretation of my favorite labyrinth, from Chartres Cathedral in France. I was struggling with how to add some color to it without distracting too much. I don’t think the grid works for that, but it was an interesting first shot at a grid with gouache. I was inspired to do this by Laura at Create Art Every Day. Some things I learned with this first grid.

1. Painting with gouache on top of collaged papers with gesso and matte medium create some unexpected and interesting effects.
2. It is important when painting a grid to let adjacent squares dry completely before painting the next square.
3. I’m not very good at waiting for paint to dry.
4. I enjoy playing with watercolors this way and have some ideas for other grid fun.

The cats are still settling in after the move and don’t want me to be in my studio. The door to my studio doesn’t latch very well so they can get in here at will. I am smarter than my cats and I put a box of art supplies in front of the door and attached a string to it to pull it against the door as I leave. However, the pathetic crying of cats while I’m in my studio has me working in my air-conditioned bedroom instead. Here is one of my assistants at work.

I hope you have a beautiful day.

Random Lily!

Tags

Cee's Photo Challenge, Flower of the Day, lily, pink

So this lily is growing next to our fence. What a pretty surprise! One of the nice things about a new house is discovering the yard as the year unfolds.

I hope you have a beautiful day! For more flower visit Cee!

Progress

Tags

100 Mandalas, art, art journal, cats, collage, gratitude, Mandala, moving

Here is Mandala 6 of 100 and some gratitude journaling. I’m moving the mandalas to the banker’s boxes that we used for moving a whole bunch of our stuff. We have very limited storage so I’m making my own custom storage system! Here is box #1 in progress.

Here is a closeup of mandala 7 of 100.

I am so grateful to be in our house with our cats and air conditioners! We are now eating most of our meals at home and we have found all the parts of our bed! It is amazing how important the basics can be when you are starting a new life in a new place!

Jeanette Clawson: Human Being

Tags

100 Mandalas, art, Jockey Hollow, Mandala, New Jersey

I met Claudia McGill today in person. She makes whimsical and lovely art and writes poetry, too. On her business card she declares her humanity. I love that and may do that on my business cards, too. Although it is just recently that I have felt confident enough to declare myself as an artist on my business cards so I may think about some more. In any case, I also had a wonderful time at the Tinicum Arts Festival. She had a booth and when I got worn out from walking I sat and talked with her and her husband. My husband drove there and bought me a hand made broom to celebrate our new house. We sign the papers tomorrow and then the moving will resume!

I had an artist at the festival do a Mehndi henna tattoo on my hand. I have had a few encounters with Mehndi lately and have been thinking about incorporating the designs into my mandalas. Here is my cat lounging on the hotel bed and providing a soft resting place for my hand. I’m working on a mandala design inspired by this tattoo. Stay tuned…

That is not the only adventure we have had this weekend. Yesterday we explored close to home in Morris County. We went to the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms. We didn’t go into the museum, but we wandered the lovely grounds and came across this mystery berry. It looks like a raspberry, but the buds look more fierce than what we are used to seeing. Does anybody recognize them?

After that we went to Jockey Hollow. Living on the East Coast I’m learning so much about our country’s history. Jockey Hollow was were George Washington’s troops spent a cold hard winter. The location is quite idyllic now.

Here are my latest mandalas. One inspired by fabric and the other by Mehndi.

I hope you have a beautiful day.

 

100 Mandalas Restart

Tags

100 Mandalas, art, Mandala

I lost track of how many mandalas I had drawn and the idea is to draw 100 in 100 days so I’m starting over. I’m looking at it as more of a series this time and building on techniques I want to explore.

Can you see some similarities to the summer waves mandala piece I made? I ran out of steam with coloring the first one. So I tried the second one on a painted page from my sketch book. I’m not going to count bigger pieces that I use my mandalas in because they usually take more than one day. I have been feeling well enough to do more art each day. I’m hoping to balance unpacking with art once we get into our new house. We close on the house on Monday, so I may not do quite as much blogging next week.

I usually draw my mandalas with my black Micron pens, but I’m loving my Distress Markers. I hope you have a beautiful day!

Summer Waves Mandala

Tags

100 Mandalas, art, collage, Mandala, Mixed Media

Here is the Community Art Project mandala I have been working on in progress. I’m not sure it’s done yet. I will let you know if it changes.

I hope you have a beautiful day.

 

 

Community Art Project Mandala in Progress

Tags

100 Mandalas, art, art journal, Blue, collage, gratitude, Green, Inktense, watercolor, Watercolor pencils

I’m working on a 6×6 canvas for a fundraiser for my Art Association back in Beaver Dam. Here are my gratitude journal pages that have been helpful in the process of trying some things out. I will show you the finished project by the end of the week.

It has been interesting to only use the art journaling supplies that I brought with me to the hotel to create this canvas. I did a lot of experimenting with textures because I only had markers and watercolors to add color and I also wanted texture and a mandala. So…

It began simply enough with some stamped and stenciled words and smiley faces scattered around the canvas. I covered them with some watercolor washes to get a layer of color on the canvas. Blue and green just make me think of summer so that was where I started. I drew a purple flower with my Derwent Inktense pencil into the wet watercolor wash to see how it turned out. It seemed like too stark a contrast and I wanted to stencil some gesso over the top to add some texture to the piece.

I cut a heart shape out of some netting that a bunch of lemons came in. I tried to use this as a stencil with the gesso but that was quite a fail. So I attached the goopy heart into my journal. I have had a lot of success with this technique with acrylic paint, and it was interesting to try. Without a brayer I couldn’t figure out how to use this to make a print. It left some strange gesso globs on the canvas that left me challenged. It is very difficult to draw a mandala on top of a highly textured collage, but I really like how it looks. So I had to get creative. I added a layer of facial tissue that had soaked up a bunch of my watercolor paint and used matte medium to attach it. In the past this has provided a nice surface to write and draw on. It was too fragile to draw the mandala on the dry tissue and was still a little too textured for the kind of detailed mandala I had in mind.

I then started drawing mandalas on a variety of papers to see how I liked them. Fortunately we needed to buy a gift for a young friend and I was so happy to buy some tissue paper. I had never drawn a mandala on this flimsy stuff but it went a lot better than I expected! I’m really excited about exploring this technique some more. You can see here I attached a piece of the mandala over all of my experiments in my journal. I really like the way the watercolor pencils add depth and highlights to the mandala. I hope you have a beautiful day!

 

Beauty in the Gap

Tags

beauty, Delaware Water Gap, gratitude, sunlight, waterfall

We explored more of the beauty of New Jersey at the Delaware Water Gap. It was a pretty strenuous trip for me, but I’m so glad Mike talked me into walking to this waterfall. The thing about waterfalls is that they occur in steep places.

We got a little lost on some way-back roads…

The 25 mile an hour speed limit was hilarious. I don’t think we got over 10 mph. My cell phone photo doesn’t really do justice to the pot holes on this gravel road. It was beautiful but really bumpy and too much dappled sunlight. You may recall my post from last week about my migraines and light. Well… when you add no food and poor maps and information, getting lost was too much for me today.

Here are some more shots of our first adventure here at the Gap. We will definitely be coming back back in the fall.

 

 

It was a beautiful day to spend with my love. I hope you had a beautiful day, too!